Hydraulic empire
A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy. The term can be generalized to cover any power structure maintained by exclusive control of a basic resource needed to live.
Civilizations
A developed "hydraulic civilization" maintains control over its population by means of controlling the supply of water. The term was coined by the German American historian Karl A. Wittfogel (1896–1988), in Oriental Despotism (1957). Wittfogel asserted that such "hydraulic civilizations" — although they were neither all located in the Orient nor characteristic of all Oriental societies — were essentially different from those of the Western world.
Most of the first civilizations in history, such as Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilization, China and pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, were hydraulic empires. Most hydraulic empires existed in desert regions, but imperial China also had some such characteristics, due to the exacting needs of rice cultivation.
Analysis
According to Wittfogel's analysis, central control over the vital resource of water gave rise to social classes and social and economic specialization, while it also gave the government power of life and death over its population. Thus, a particularly extreme despotism is typical of hydraulic empires -- historically, many of the empires Wittfogel classes as "hydraulic" revered their rulers as gods.
The typical hydraulic empire government, in Wittfogel's thesis, is extremely centralized, with no trace of an independent aristocracy -- in contrast to the decentralized feudalism of medieval Europe. Though tribal societies had structures that were usually personal in nature, exercised by a patriarch over a tribal group related by various degrees of kinship, hydraulic hierarchies gave rise to the established permanent institution of impersonal government. Popular revolution in such a state was impossible: a dynasty might die out or be overthrown by force, but the new regime would differ very little from the old one. Hydraulic empires were only ever destroyed by foreign conquerors.
Wittfogel's ideas, when applied to China, have been harshly criticized by scholars such as Joseph Needham who argued essentially that Wittfogel was operating from ignorance of basic Chinese history. Needham argued that the Chinese government was not despotic, was not dominated by a priesthood, and that Wittfogel's perspective does not address the necessity and presence of bureaucracy in modern Western civilization.
Examples in Science Fiction:
Variations on hydraulic empires, in which some other critical material is controlled, are a theme in some science fiction.
The best known example is Frank Herbert's Dune series. The spice mélange from sandworm corpses is essential for prolonging human lifespan, faster than light travel, and precognition esper ability. A saying used within the books is "He who controls the spice, controls the universe!" Withdrawal causes death.
Destiny's Road by Larry Niven (1998) is another example: "speckles" are a missing nutrient in the planet's normal biosphere; withdrawal causes stupidity. Similarly, thallium oxide is a requirement for the virus found in tree-of-life in the Ringworld series, but more absolute.
In A World Out of Time, also by Larry Niven, the protagonist (Corbell) describes the State (a totalitarian world government) as a water empire to his ship's AI, and claims that water empires can only fall through external intervention. Corbell's ship's AI decides that Corbell himself could be such an external force and sends Corbell into the far future in an attempt to protect the State.
The Sten Chronicles series of books by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch (8 books): Anti-Matter Two is a safer, more controllable form of anti-matter, and only the Eternal Emperor knows the manufacturing process and is zealous in its sale and use.